The article is written from a brazilian standpoint, so keep that in mind when comparing with your own experiences of the language.
Recently, there was a polemic in social media that Portuguese mothers were worried their kids were only speaking "Brazilian", due to the dominance of Brazilian content creators in Youtube, Instagram, TikTok...
[1]: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/mundo/2021/11/4962302-... (Portuguese)
Pronunciation bothers us the least actually, but other things are weird and/or plain wrong for us:
- Lots of weird words adapted from English like "time" (pronounced "tee-me") which means team in PT-BR. Portuguese has a fine word for that already - equipa ("equipe" in BR) - and most of us speak good English so "time" is beyond weird for us.
- Wrong verb conjugations are used in informal conversation, e.g. "tu vai à praia?" (correct would be "tu vais à praia?" and generally we'd omit "tu" [you] because it adds no useful information)
- Many Brazilians seemingly think "mas" (but) and "mais" (more) are the same word because they pronounce it similarly and thus end up using "mais" for everything, even in writing
- Different usage of pronouns, e.g. "eu dou-lhe" in PT vs "eu lhe dou" in BR (or worse, "eu dou a você" - sounds like caveman language plus "você" is considered rude in PT)
Vocabulary differences make for some really funny misunderstandings sometimes though. My Brazilian neighbor's kid was really confused and scared when she was told she needed to "levar uma pica" (get a shot, as in an injection/vaccine) - in Brazil this same sentence means "take a dick". I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time.
Looking at your examples:
- Brazilians borrows words from other languages a lot more easily than the Portuguese, especially when the foreign word is shorter. No wonder "time" gets more usage than "equipe".
- "tu" is going to become extinct in Brazil within the next generation or two. People only use first- or third-person conjugation anyway. "Você" is going to be used for making the distinction between the actual subject of the sentence, and coloquially people just say "cê", which is just as short as "tu", so I don't see it surviving for long.
- Disagree on "Mas/mais". Yes, it is true that a lot of people make this mistake or (worse) don't even know the distinction, but this type of error is equivalent to English "they're/their/there": there is no redundancy or efficiency, so I don't see why the language would change here.
- "dou-lhe", "lhe dou": also going to be extinct due to the redundancy with propositions. You (and I) may not like the "caveman language", but it's undeniably more efficient to just throw verb + proposition + person than to deal with different pronouns.
Nowadays there is still some prejudice but the vast majority of people does not have any issues with Brazilians and, unless you are unlucky enough to run into some asshole, you'll probably not notice it at all. Kids care even less about these things so your kids are very unlikely to be bullied in school or anything like that.
In fact, my partner is originally from Brazil and her family moved here when she was 13. She always had friends, never really felt discriminated against, and is now sitting next to me working on her PhD thesis. The rest of her family loves it here too.
So I would say if you want to move here, go for it! Boa sorte :)
In the Carioca accent, mas and mais have the same pronunciation (“maish” with the s chiado) so it’s easy to confuse one for the other. This has to do with the Carioca tendency to “change” (there’s a linguistic term but I forget) certain vowels. Nós is pronounced “noish”, gas “gaish” and Petrobras “Petrobraish”.
I guess the mas/mais confusion carries over in writing albeit being incorrect.
This does not happen in thr Paulista accent or most other accents I know.
And I've also heard from Portuguese that they find Brazilians easier to understand than some of their own compatriots, especially now that telenovelas have spread Brazilian vocabulary in Portugal.
In the late 80's & 90's Portugal started importing TV programs from Brazil. Since the 2000's this happens much less, but that has been replaced by a large number of Brazilian immigrants settling in Portugal.
As far as I can tell there are no equivalent influences going in the other direction, so Brazilians are rarely exposed to Portuguese pronunciation.